Jane Webster. 2023. Materializing the Middle Passage: a historical archaeology of British slave shipping, 1680–1807. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-921459-4 £130.

In the concluding chapter of Materializing the Middle Passage, Jane Webster asserts that "it is possible to materialize many aspects of the Middle Passage" that millions of African captives endured as one section of the trade route that took enslaved Africans to the Americas and West Indies; however, she then acknowledges that "in that endeavour, I have needed to draw primarily on the written testimonies of the sailors who crewed the ships" (p.439).The result of the tension captured in those sentences-between Webster's interest in material culture and her necessary reliance on textual sources-is a unique and fascinating book about the trafficking of enslaved Africans on British ships.Materializing the Middle Passage combines an archaeologist's focus on goods, crafts and built environments with (mostly) the textual sources of historians, although Webster makes great use of art and material artefacts wherever possible."There are other ways to excavate the slave ship," Webster insists, than relying on the discovery and exhumation of shipwrecks (p.2).Explicitly embracing historical archaeology, Materializing the Middle Passage seeks to "marry words and things" (p.5).Webster brings together the material and textual remains of the British Atlantic slave trade not only through inter-disciplinary methods but also relentless research.To uncover the shipboard environments and experiences of the Atlantic crossing, Webster investigates the excavation records of all known slave-ship wrecks, artworks by eyewitnesses depicting slave ships, testimonies from UK parliamentary investigations of the slave trade, and surviving journals and autobiographies from crew members and captives alike.Taking a capacious view of the Middle Passage, Webster also looks beyond the seaborne voyages of captives and sailors from Africa to the Americas to investigate the commodities that Europeans delivered to West African societies in exchange for captives, the changing African representations of Europeans and their ships in art and iconography, and memories of the ocean crossing in the communities that enslaved people created in the Americas.It is a staggering research effort, and I imagine readers from any discipline will be exposed to new material.As a historian of the slave trade, I found most of Webster's textual sources familiar, but I had encountered only a fraction of the art, shipwrecks and material remains upon which she draws.Even familiar sources were interpreted from a fresh and intriguing perspective.On the surface, Materializing the Middle Passage is about 'things' but the book is really about mindsets.Webster deploys the material record and textual evidence about the slave trade's environments and conditions to explore the worldviews of both the traders (European and African) and those people they traded.Through coats of arms and displays of